Yuriy Baglaenko, PhD

I'm a research scientist focused on immunology, genetics and genomics. I aim to use new technologies to unlock the mysteries of inflammatory diseases. My research is a mixture of experimental and computational work with large-scale datasets.

My interest in this work stems from my training and a deep desire to better understand the immune system and how its dysregulation leads to disease. I have an overwhelming need to push scientific boundaries! “Crazy but important” is our group motto. Ultimately, it's all rooted in the idea that my work can benefit people by understanding disease causes or leading to tangibly better outcomes. That is why I chose immunology and genetics as a discipline all those years ago.

My research goals are to better understand gene regulation in T and B cells, finding and validating causal autoimmune variants, developing new experimental and computational single-cell tools, and using cutting-edge genomic editing technologies to drive our understanding and treatment of autoimmune diseases.

I’m excited about my work in progress, a multiomic single-cell assay for linking clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) editing to cell surface antibody expression and the transcriptome. This is a radically better way of assaying CRISPR-edited cells at the single-cell level. My other important contributions include large-scale single-cell studies in infectious disease and methods related to that analysis, producing a better understanding of dynamic gene regulation in T cells and CRISPR editing of human primary B cells.

I've been a researcher for over 13 years and began working at Cincinnati Children's in 2023. Being a researcher can be difficult as experimental science is hard, and failure is part of the equation; however, it's how we learn and grow. Experimentation is the willingness to fail in order to learn. To find out more about our group, please visit our webpage, baglaenkolab.com.